Tag: BusinessObjects

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Mapping Drilling Hierarchies

Business Intelligence Mapping Drilling Hierarchies

In dimensional modeling there are various types of hierarchy that range from simplistic to complex hierarchies with multiple level starting points. These complex hierarchies are often referred to as ragged hierarchies. Ragged hierarchies can occur because some of your source data systems may capture data at a very granular level whilst another system may capture or output data at summary levels.

You may also be using third party data and wish to combine it with your in house data. When the data is consolidated it may not be possible to populate all levels of the hierarchy with the same coverage if at all.

In these situations it can be useful to undertake a mapping exercise with an outcome similar to that shown in the diagram. This should occur before modelling the hierarchies in dimension tables and the ETL build.

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SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports 2008 is a dynamic Enterprise Reporting tool. The reports can be scheduled, shared and viewed within SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise. Its powerful chart engine helps the user visualize and explore corporate data and drill down through data hierarchies.

It is also possible to embed several other reports (sub reports) within a single Crystal Report or to fire off a sub report on demand when required. In this way a lot of information can be stored within a single report. Crystal Xcelsius Dashboards can also be embedded and called from within a Crystal Report on demand.

Crystal Reports has a very powerful formula editor which allows the use of coding with the Basic language. It is also excellent for printing presentation documents with its pixel perfect print engine. Crystal Reports can also connect to numerous data sources including SAP BusinessObjects universes and SAP R3.

However this tool is not an ad hoc tool like Web Intelligence or Voyager and it is not recommended that a user attempts to drag and drop fields in an ad hoc way. It requires some technical skill to develop with it beyond a simple report. That said, for Enterprise Reporting with large and complex reports it is a powerful workhorse. It utilises a cache server and provides page on demand functionality. For example if a report runs to 300 pages and the user requires page 197, then Crystal can serve up that single page without having to download the whole document.

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Russell Beech, Founder of BI System Builders & Cornerstone Solution®

I architect data solutions and superintend the solutions that I architect. I build teams that are usually a mix of full-time employees and sub-contractors. I ensure mentoring and knowledge transfer. The emergence of big data has opened the door to a rise in interest in predictive analytics aka machine learning. The technology changes have provided the opportunity to architect data solutions which combine enterprise data warehousing experience with data lake concepts and to apply knowledge of statistics to that data to deliver predictive analytics. To that end I’m putting effort into understanding how the evolving technologies hook in to each other. I have a focused interest in big data technologies especially on the Google Cloud Platform. Technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, Apache Beam, BigQuery and Tensorflow (machine learning) and their integration/virtualization with the enterprise data warehouse.

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